Works about bereavement multiplying

Chris Jones, Tribune theater criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Like a steely, unshrinking schoolteacher railing against the folly of a pleasure-seeking youth, Vanessa Redgrave fixes a gimlet eye on her Broadway audience. "It will happen to you," she says, directly addressing the orchestra section, "That's why I am here."

Redgrave is speaking about death.

Not so much our own demise, because there is a lack of verifiable evidence concerning its aftermath. But in the persona of the writer Joan Didion, who lost her beloved husband, John Gregory Dunne, even as Didion's now-deceased daughter, Quintana Roo, lay in a coma, the redoubtable Redgrave is speaking of the inevitable death of the people we love most. "You might think you'll see it straight," she says of that agonizing time. "You won't. You'll see it as a kind of first draft."

Plays about death are nothing new. But there surely has been a sudden surge in works about the experiences of those left behind following someone else's final curtain.

Examples abound

Aside from the icily unsentimental "The Year of Magical Thinking," in limited Broadway engagement, there's Sherry Kramer's more emotional "When Something Wonderful Ends," which was at the recent Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville. In Chicago, audiences can ponder the ongoing "Rabbit Hole" at the Goodman Theatre, David Lindsay-Abaire's sad play about the marital aftermath of the accidental death of a couple's small child.

The Didion show, which was adapted from her best-selling 2005 book, and the Kramer piece, penned after the death of the writer's mother, are memoirs of experience. Each features one actress, playing the author and addressing the audience.

Kramer's play -- flawed but heartfelt -- speaks of the clarity that can follow bereavement, a fresh ability to control everything in one's life except the one thing you want the most: the return of the person who has died. Didion's piece, directed by David Hare, is very much about the inability of an intellectual rationalist to deal with the finality of bereavement without resort to fantasy or, as she puts it, "magical thinking." She can compute the event, she tells us, but not its consequences.

And writing about one's fears is desirable because it often results in intense, authentic, profitable creativity.

And what is the consumer to make of all this? Is this a reflection of a nation at war? More evidence of bereavement coming out of the cultural closet? Exploitation of self? An admirable attempt to create works of real meaning?

Maybe all at once.

Death sells well

For sure, one could take a cynical point of view. Despite Redgrave's line, Broadway shows don't exist purely for instructional reasons, but to make a profit. Death, which is inherently high-stakes drama, always has sold well. And indeed, there is a case to be made that "The Year of Magical Thinking" unwisely expands personal grief into public spectacle. Much is made in the piece of Didion's worry that her hospitalized daughter will find out about her father's death on CNN. As Redgrave articulates it, you think of people bereaved in anonymity, unable to get people to pay attention to their own grief or to the qualities of their dearly departed.

But I considered and abandoned that view. Didion, a superb writer, makes the powerful case here that money assuages none of the pain of bereavement. No balm arrives with a check. No education prepares you.

This is a strangely cold and restrained show -- perhaps because those involved were understandably determined to avoid those sticky flytraps of emotional exploitation. But Redgrave is such a formidable actress (and one who comes with obvious parallels to Didion's persona), she's able here to probe the idea of her character confronting (if not quite rethinking) her own lifelong disavowal of cheap sentiment.

For at the end of a cherished life, such cultural distinctions tend to disappear.